Israel Makov opens a window into six decades of collecting and championing Israeli art

It started on a drive up North more than 60 years ago.

“We were broke,” Makov says, smiling.

While they were there, they met a local artist.

“We didn’t know anything about art,” he says, “but we loved his works. My wife especially was moved.”

“And from then on, we never stopped.”

Nira died in 2006. Rather than let the collecting end with her, Makov took it more seriously. That’s when he met Shulamit Nuss, who has curated the collection ever since.

All of it is now the subject of a new book, Viewpoints: Selected Works from the Israel Makov Collection. It is not a catalog. It is closer to a portrait of the collection and of the man who built it.

The rule, such as it is, is simple. “In the end the decision is mine,” Makov says. “If a painting doesn’t move me, it doesn’t go into the collection. This collection wasn’t built out of some organized methodology, or an ambition to catalog periods, but mainly out of works that moved me personally.”

Nuss filters works for what she thinks will speak to him, and they usually go to see things together, but the final call is always his.

Aviva Magal, his personal assistant, brought order to a collection that had grown faster than anyone could track: specialist software, a database built from nothing, every work photographed, cataloged, and numbered. It was a long process. It is also why the collection can now lend to museums easily, and why someone always knows where each work is.

In recent years Makov’s partner, Bella Lustig, has joined him on this path. She is an art lover in her own right. The two visit galleries and museums together, in Israel and abroad, and she helps decide which works to buy.

In his note at the front of the book, he writes that she shares the same devotion to art and the same belief in its power to move, inspire, and provoke reflection.

We meet in his office, in a room hung with a triptych by Shlomit Gopher, the young artist who won the Israel Makov Prize for a Promising Artist at Freshpaint Art Fair last year.

Gopher came up to Makov at the book launch at Gordon Gallery, so moved she could barely contain her feelings of gratitude. He had never met her; a committee chooses the winners, not him. He asked for her address so he could send the money.

“You don’t understand what this prize does for me,” she told him. “It will let me work all year and prepare the next exhibition.”

Nearby hangs a painting by Tigist Yoseph Ron, an Ethiopian-Israeli artist Nuss calls wonderful.

“We bought works of hers before she won the Haim Shiff Prize,” Makov says, “when she was still quite near the beginning.”

Further on are the Israeli classics. Nuss points to a work hanging behind them, a Lea Nikel, from Israel in the 1950s. Makov places her with Ofakim Hadashim, the New Horizons group he has always loved and with whom she exhibited. He adores Nikel above almost any of them, and the collection holds many of her finest works.

Beside it hang a Yehudit Levin, whose work Nuss notes was shown recently at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and a Nirvana Assadi Dabbah.

A few steps on is a cluster of the New Barbizon, Natalia Zourabova, Olga Kundina, and Anna Lukashevsky, three of the five Soviet-born painters who formed the group in 2010 and carried their easels out into the street, naming themselves for the 19th-century French school that did the same.

“And there are more artists there,” Makov says. “Really beautiful. We hung them before their exhibition.” Early again, as usual.

He moves through the rooms the way other people move between old friends.

None of this happened on the margins of a quiet life. Makov, a native of Rehovot and a descendant of one of its founding families, founded Israel’s first biotechnology company, Interpharm, and served as president and CEO of Teva from 2002 to 2007, driving the company to the top of the global generics industry.

Since then, he has chaired a long line of companies, including Given Imaging and Netafim, and, for a decade, Sun Pharma, and he chairs three more today.

He holds an honorary doctorate at the Weizmann Institute, and he chairs the Gesher Theatre in Tel Aviv.

Through it all, the art was never a sideline.

“When I was CEO of Teva, we set up a sculpture garden at the Ramat Hovav plant in the South,” he says. “There was a competition among local artists, and every year the winner’s work was displayed in the garden.”

The collection’s spine runs back through Yosef Zaritsky, Reuven Rubin, and Lea Nikel. But Makov’s eye points forward, and he has little patience for the question of who is established and who is not.

“Look, I don’t choose by age,” he says. “It doesn’t matter to me how old the artist is.” He gestures toward work by Hadas Satt, whom he calls excellent, and by Gad Alexander. “Things that move me.”

In 2019, Makov turned that instinct into something formal, in partnership with the Ashdod Museum of Art.

“Yona Fischer made the connection,” he says of the late curator, one of the most influential figures in Israeli art.

Awarded every two years, the Nira Makov Prize for the Encouragement of Artistic Creation, given in collaboration with the Ashdod Museum of Art, funds an artist’s first museum solo exhibition and the catalog that accompanies it. The prize is open to artists young and established alike, as long as there is a mature body of work behind them.

The photographer Tomer Kep was the first winner, with an exhibition that opened in 2021; Hadas Satt was the second, and Lior Tamim followed.

That instinct, to see something before the world does, and then to act on it, is what the book, edited by Irith Hadar in collaboration with Nuss, sets out to capture.

It makes no attempt at a chronological history of Israeli art, on the premise that every collection is also a likeness of whoever assembled it.

The book moves through three thematic sections: “Outside,” on people, landscape, and place; “Inside,” on identity and interior space; and “Acts of Painting,” on the act of painting itself.

Woven between them are chapters on the five artists most heavily represented in the collection – Marcel Janco, Avraham Naton, Lea Nikel, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, and Micha Laury. More than 100 artists appear in all.

The book was born “out of a desire to share, and in response to the encouragement of friends and fellow art lovers,” Makov writes in a note at the front.

As the collection grew, only a small number of works remained readily accessible.

The impulse to share came before the book. Since 2018, the Ashdod Museum of Art has run a series of exhibitions drawn from the collection in its Collection Gallery: Lea Nikel shown with Moshe Kupferman, Liliane Klapisch with Talia Israeli, a show devoted to the New Horizons abstractionists, and “Perspectives of Place” in 2021. Works go out on loan.

Of everything the collection has given him, the moment he singles out is watching a visitor stop in front of a painting, look closely, ask questions, and find in it something unexpectedly their own.

He has never sold a work, he says, and does not intend to. Makov buys what he feels passionate about and has never once thought of it as an investment.

The collection lends to museums. It keeps growing. It keeps buying from artists nobody has heard of yet. Nothing leaves it.